I started by stamping backgrounds on several pages, to get over the fear of marking the pristine white pages.

This one is actually a gold gocco print but it will do quite nicely as a background, too.  My theme is lines and grids so there will be plenty of them.

I also did an image transfer of this inkjet print of a photo of reeds – lots of verticals and a few horizontal…  This will provide some background as well for something on top.  Not sure what yet but time will tell!  This exercise showed me just how thin the paper is – as you can see, the pages are looking a bit distressed already!  I think I’m going to run with this; most of my work is pretty distressed anyway.  Or distressing…  I have painted gesso on a few pages to see how that works out, and I plan to glue a few of the pages together rather than replace them completely with thicker art paper.  Oh well, with one thing and another this will certainly look like a working sketchbook when it’s finished!  I have already exploited the thin pages by making marks with my parallel pens on the reverse side of a sketch, which show nicely through the thin paper.   I’ll try and remember to photograph that one next time.  And I plan to layer some of the pages with polyester organza.

This is one of the sketches I’ve done already.  I’m very into shadows at the moment, particularly over bridges and I like how the shadows from these girders on the footbridge almost form an enclosing tunnel.  They interact with the corrugated metal sides to form grids. 

This is a postcard sized piece of card which I think I’ll stick into the sketchbook later if I’m happy with it.  I drew crayon lines on to the card before making an image transfer of another photo – this one is of the shadow cast by an iron fence.  Not sure where I’m going with this yet and if it’ll end up in the book or not…

Seen on my latest reeds photo session….. coming up soon!

This piece by Wendy Allan was encased in glass and displayed, backlit, in an alcove, on the way into the main octagonal room.

This machine stitched hanging by Alice Kettle – the photo doesn’t give a fair indication of its size, which is huge…

This is a work by Matthew Harris constructed from cloth ‘that is made imperfect as a result of tears, patches, darns and frayed edges held together with utilitarian stitch’ to quote from the show catalogue.

Anna Glasbrook had made the panels shown below.  I loved the way you could see through them and they changed with the angle at which you looked at them.

Detail of one panel:

Detail of another panel:

This hanging and the two related panels on the left were made by Carole Waller. 

This is a tapestry made by Kirsten Glasbrook.  Apparently she used nettle, hemp and cotton yarns.  I did like the way it was displayed over the rough stonework.

There were several other exhibits, which I’m afraid I don’t have room for here, including a selection of yummy garments and scarves and the work of Alison Harper, who knits using crisp packets and invited everyone to add a bit or unravel a bit…. 

More later on my visit to Bath itself – couldn’t leave without photographing random paving stones and interesting looking bricks!

Some of them were done with my right hand (I’m right handed) some with my left – I found that mark making with my left hand produced surprisingly creative marks.  Something to do with right brained activities and left brained ones I suppose…

And more:

I wasn’t doing these with any particular design in mind, mostly… just playing.  Which is probably why I enjoy it so much!

The pens came with coloured inks, too, so I had fun with those:

Claire suggested making these into little books so I think that’s what I’ll do.

Before the week started, Claire sent us a list of questions to answer and send to them in advance, and this in itself was a valuable exercise.  They were things like, what do you want to commit to in the coming months, what do you need to do to realise this and how can we help?    I think the key word for me both before and during the week, was focus.  To choose one thing and focus on it, and get rid of all the extraneous things; be willing to chuck anything that isn’t working and stop fluttering like a butterfly on to any and everything textile related, the latest technique, the latest ‘must have’ item.   I think that ever since City & Guilds, when you get to try lots of different techniques and samples, I’ve been a ‘butterfly’, hopping on to one craze and then the next without getting deeper and trying to make my own path through one thing, ignoring all the rest.

So during that week I decided that what I really love is to colour the fabric, and that the stitching bit isn’t really important to me; often I would dye cloth or paint it and then feel I had to make it into something, and stitch it, and then it got put into a pile and never used.  So I decided that I’d concentrate on wholecloth work.    Hence my destashing over the last few weeks.  (There are still about 8 fabric bundles left, by the way, plug, plug!!)  I freecycled a load of stuff, chucked out or rehoused another load (what hordes of rubbish I was collecting in there in the hope that it would come in useful one day….), rearranged my studio and moved the tables around to make it easier to paint and print large pieces of cloth.  I did hope that I might be able to have a sink put in there but that looks as though it might be too impractical.  But already it feels more workable and I’ve been getting down to a piece of work that I started sampling on the course.

Claire and Leslie were great during the week – there were only 5 of us on the course and so we were able to have lots of one to one time with them.  Over the last year I have been trying to work on a series about the local river and I had already come to the conclusion that I was trying to do too much in each piece and so got bored and come unstuck.  They helped me see that I had to be a lot more specific – FOCUS again! – so I decided that I would take the theme of reeds and develop design material round that during the week.   Claire advised me to do a writing exercise to help put into words exactly what I wanted to say in a particular piece and so I was able to do mark making around those words and feelings.    Here are some of the designs which came out of that:

When I’d done a lot of design work, with Claire and Leslie’s help I picked out several which seemed to work best with the words and thoughts about what I was trying to achieve, and then we used acetates to see how these would work when layered.  After that I worked on a sample of cloth to see how these would turn out in colour.  Here is the result (though the photo isn’t very faithful to the colours and there are some random shadows which aren’t there in the original!).

I’m in the process of making this into a large wall piece and the great thing is that I have a load of design material and ideas to develop other pieces in a series on reeds.     And, more importantly, I learnt to see how to get from doing a load of design stuff to actually translating it into fabric without being too literal.  I made the above sample with fabric paints using a stamp cut from a rubber, a credit card, a scrubbing brush and a piece of laminated plastic!

Through the week, as well as working on our own designs (and every one of us worked on very different things), we got together and Claire and Leslie taught us about the elements of design, what you have to have in a design to make it work and how to critique our own pieces of work to help us ascertain why they were or weren’t working.   And lots of other discussion about methods of working, ways of framing or finishing pieces of work – and yummy lunches and endless cups of tea and coffee in the process!   The course took place in Claire’s wonderful house and an important part of the atmosphere was the beauty all around.   It was a wonderful week and a pivotal one, for me, I think.  Time will tell on that last point.

On a ‘blog admin’ note, because of all the spam I’ve been getting recently and comments from people who are obviously advertising financial products and the like, I’ve turned off comments on posts over 60 days old. I don’t think this will cause any problems for genuine commentors, but feel free to leave a comment on one of the more recent posts!